Working Life

Under the heading of “this is not surprising”, I’d put this news: bank CEOs are playing a central role in moving companies overseas–or, actually, just reincorporating them to dodge taxes. And all for the usual reason: nice fat bank fees that help underwrite the pay packages of Jamie Dimon and his gang–the same gang that wrecked the economy, but still have their jobs.

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The tender landscape of art can often obscure labor nastiness, and stupidity, that rivals anything you’d find in the corporate world, with stupidity and greed part of the mix (take Arianna Huffington, grand narcissist, who is happy to leach off writers and make tens of millions along the way). Welcome to the New York Metropolitan Opera, folks, which, true to form, is trying to lay blame on its workers and threatening a lock-out, when mismanagement has been the order of the day.

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Sunday there will be yet another ceremony at the National Baseball Hall of Fame–and it will be, without anyone saying so, a ceremony that continues the despicable behavior towards the one man who did more to change baseball outside the lines than perhaps any single individual: Marvin Miller. Despicable because, simply because Marvin Miller built the players’ union into a serious union, the owners have refused to vote him into the Hall of Fame. It’s even more despicable because, after Miller died at age 95 in November 2012, you would think that people would have an ounce of decency, a bit of humanity, to tamp down the animosity enough to be big and do the right thing. But, they have not.

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I detect a president who thinks he’s found a very potent political argument. Having gone soft on the bankers, letting all the big fish skate after wrecking the economy, the president has figured out that people just won’t stand for a tax system that leaves regular people holding the tab while CEOs figure out how to screw the public, day after day. And, so, he’s now personally calling for an end to so-called tax “inversions”

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Tick, tick, tick, tick…every minute that goes by is another minute workers are being robbed–in particular, those people forced to work for the slave-like minimum wage. And if you looked back just five years, there’s a price tag to that robbery: over $300 billion.

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In the debate over tax inversions–that little corporate maneuver to reincorporate abroad to avoid U.S. taxes–there’s a little fight going on about a small but significant issue: if legislation passes to stop this scam, should it be retroactive? Of course it should.

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This is simply a tale of having a gun put to your head: vote “yes” or we screw you even harder.

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Love those CEOs obfuscating the truth. I know, you’re shocked. This little pearl comes in the arena of tax avoidance.

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Stumbled on a conversation today that is quite intriguing: using the post office as a bank outlet. Guess what? It existed decades ago. It could happen again–but, you’ll never guess who hates the idea? OK, yup.

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Heh. That’s likely what those corporate legal and accounting minds are thinking: nuttin’ is going to pass that stops that nice little scam allowing corporations to incorporate overseas to avoid paying taxes in the U.S.

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Flag-waving patriots don’t particularly impress me. Too many are the types to want to go to war–but never serve themselves (a la Dick Cheney’s “I had other priorities” during the Vietnam War). Here’s an economic “patriot” who is only as good as profits to her corporation.

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Well, gee, no surprise here. A big CIVIL penalty for a major financial scam but no banker is heading to jail. Yet. Or probably never.

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For the millions of people hitting the road at this very hour, and in the hours to come, it’s going to be a bumpy journey, crashing through potholes after pothole, rutted road after rutted road, and creaky bridge after creaky bridge–all thanks to the dismal shape of the country’s infrastructure (which gets a D+ from the American Society of Civil Engineers). No doubt, drivers will curse a whole list of people–but a small wager that few give up a few choice words for a big culprit: corporate greed.

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The campaign for a $10.10 federal minimum wage, championed by the president, Democrats in Congress and a whole raft of “liberal/progressive” organizations, is a very bad idea.

To be clear, I’m not arguing it’s too ambitious. The opposite: what we need is a campaign, now, today, for a minimum wage of $20-an-hour. Anything less is a failure to confront poverty in America and a bankrupt economic system.

$10.10-an-hour will not allow people to make a fair living, or challenge the basic, “We-make-profits-thanks-to-poverty” system that underpins today’s real world economy.

Anything short of $20-a-hour is a capitulation to the most narrow politics, particularly on the part of so-called “liberals/progressives” who are, unintentionally, locking into place deep poverty in America and ratifying the basic principle of the so-called “free market”.

And $20-an-hour actually relates to real life after you look at a very complicated idea: simple math.

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Personally, I have to say I’m a bit queasy about the “Buy American” campaign. Seems to me that the problem is not, ultimately, that people don’t buy American products. It’s that wages are way too low elsewhere — which is what needs to be solved. But, for the record, the Trans Pacific Partnership will obliterate “Buy American”.

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It seems more likely than not that, in a short while, the Supreme Court will inflict a deep wound in public union organizing, and, ultimately, the power of organized labor in the workplace and in politics. But, just a small word on what silver lining could be found here–and I know my friends will perhaps violently disagree.

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